Olivia Wakim
Olivia Wakim tells stories about how restaurants and gathering places shape everyday life, blending service-focused dining guides with reporting on food, culture and community. She is a lifestyle reporter at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, working across its food, lifestyle and culture sections and covering the restaurant industry alongside broader arts and culture stories. Her coverage stands out for the way it links what people eat and where they meet to the neighborhoods, small businesses and social spaces that surround them.
Food, culture and community spaces
Wakim’s lifestyle reporting often looks beyond the plate to explore how public spaces foster connection and belonging. In her feature on why metro Atlanta needs “third places” and how communities are building them, she explains the concept of social spaces outside home and work and highlights breweries, bookstores, coffee shops and craft clubs that function as modern gathering spots. She profiles people who create these spaces and traces how they support community, making social infrastructure a recurring thread in her work.
That same interest appears in her story on what a new food hall could mean for a south Atlanta neighborhood, where she reports on a development anchored by stalls such as Staxx and examines how the project may reshape local options and community life.
Her piece on The Reading Room, an independent bookstore and food-focused space, likewise centers the founders’ story and the vision behind the venue. Rather than only listing what to eat or buy, she spends time on why these places exist and what they offer the surrounding community.
Across these features, Wakim’s distinguishing focus is on food as a doorway into larger questions about access, gathering and neighborhood change.
Restaurant openings and industry coverage
Wakim covers the restaurant industry as a beat, tracking openings, expansions and chef moves with a clear sense of the local scene. In a round-up on more than two dozen new metro Atlanta restaurants that opened in a jam-packed June, co-bylined with a colleague, she helps map out the pace and range of new concepts across the region. She reports on individual openings such as D’bo’s Daiquiris, Wings and Seafood, a restaurant entering downtown with a focus on daiquiris and comfort food.
Her coverage of Mushi Ni’s long-awaited Inman Park restaurant details how the new location expands on a food hall stall with bao and cocktails, and what the larger menu and full bar mean for diners in that neighborhood.
She follows personnel changes as well as real estate, co-writing a story about two chefs landing new gigs, which tracks how talent moves between kitchens and the impact on their new homes. Wakim also picks up more targeted industry angles, such as recognizing a seasonal cocktail like the Pink Kiss at Joey D’s Oak Room, spotlighting how individual menu items can define a bar’s character.
Through these pieces, her restaurant coverage mixes broad scene-setting round-ups with close looks at single venues, emphasizing both the business side of openings and the experiences they create for guests.
Service-minded guides for diners and shoppers
Service journalism is a major part of Wakim’s food work, and she writes guides that help readers decide where to go and what to try. In “Cool off with frozen treats at these Atlanta dessert shops and restaurants,” she curates spots where people can find ice cream, shaved ice and other cold desserts, organizing options around the practical question of beating the heat. She brings a similar approach to “12 Southern-made gifts for the foodie on your shopping list,” where she selects regionally made products and frames them as concrete gift ideas for food lovers.
Those guides are framed around specific needs or occasions, and each entry gives readers something actionable to do.
Her dining guides extend to experiences as well as objects. An AJC Food feature on seven food tours credits her as the writer and walks audiences through guided tasting routes that offer structured ways to explore the city’s restaurants and culinary history. In another project, she contributes to an Atlanta FIFA World Cup dining guide, connecting global soccer fandom with local food options and helping readers plan where to eat around matches.
Across these pieces, Wakim focuses on clarity, utility and variety, making her work especially useful for people looking for curated, locally grounded recommendations.
Multi-platform storytelling and voice
Wakim’s role has evolved from digital content producer on the food and dining team to lifestyle reporter, and that background shows in how she works across formats.
She has been described as a digital content producer who understands that every great meal tells a story, underscoring her emphasis on narrative even in short service pieces. She appears in AJC Food social content, including Instagram features where her byline anchors dining guides like the food tours package and the World Cup coverage. Her reporting also feeds into special projects such as the AJC Headline House activation at Krog Street Market, where she is involved in on-site coverage and promotion.
Outside the newsroom, Wakim runs a Substack newsletter that includes her own dining guide, recipes and occasional commentary, extending her food voice beyond the masthead.
That personal work mirrors her professional beat: she curates where to eat, shares how to cook and gives readers a sense of her perspective on the dining scene. Taken together, her multi-platform work marks her as a reporter who combines traditional beat coverage with social and newsletter storytelling, while keeping a consistent focus on restaurants, community spaces and the practical details that shape how people experience them.
She joined the Atlanta Journal-Constitution as an intern in 2023 and now reports on lifestyle, food and culture, giving her a relatively fresh yet steadily expanding body of work on the city’s restaurant and gathering-place ecosystem. Her coverage is distinguished less by criticism and more by accessible, narrative-rich service reporting that connects where people eat, shop and gather to the communities they move through every day.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.